Aśvaghoṣa's Gold - Translations of Aśvaghoṣa's Buddhacarita & Saundarananda by Mike Cross (2015).pdf

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Introduction – 1

Table of Contents

Abbreviations

– Introduction –

Acknowledgements

BUDDHACARITA

Canto 1: bhagavat-prasūtiḥ

Canto 2: antaḥ-pura-vihāraḥ

Canto 3: saṁvegotpattiḥ

Canto 4: strī-vighātanaḥ

Canto 5: abhiniṣkramaṇaḥ

Canto 6: chandaka-nivartanaḥ

Canto 7: tapo-vana-praveśaḥ

Canto 8: antaḥ-pura-vilāpaḥ

Canto 9: kumārānveṣaṇaḥ

Canto 10: śreṇyābhigamanaḥ

Canto 11: kāma-vigarhaṇaḥ

Canto 12: arāḍa-darśanaḥ

Canto 13: māra-vijayaḥ

Canto 14: abhisambodhiḥ

SAUNDARANANDA

Canto 1: kapilavāstu-varṇanaḥ

Canto 2: rāja-varṇanaḥ

Canto 3: tathāgata-varṇanaḥ

Canto 4: bhāryā-yācitakaḥ

Canto 5: nanda-pravrājanaḥ

Canto 6: bhāryā-vilāpaḥ

Canto 7: nanda-vilāpaḥ

Canto 8: strī-vighātaḥ

Canto 9: madāpavādaḥ

Canto 10: svarga-nidarśanaḥ

Canto 11: svargāpavādaḥ

Canto 12: pratyavamarśaḥ

Canto 13: śīlendriya-jayaḥ

Canto 14: ādi-prasthānaḥ

Canto 15: vitarka-prahāṇaḥ

Canto 16: ārya-satya-vyākhyānaḥ

Canto 17: amṛtādhigamaḥ

Canto 18: ājñā-vyākaraṇaḥ

Abbreviations:

BC: Buddha-carita

DN: Digha Nikāya (Collection of Long Discourses)

EBC: EB Cowell

EHJ: EH Johnston

LC: Linda Covill

MMK: Mūla-madhyamaka-kārikā (“The Middle” of Nāgārjuna)

MN: Majjhima Nikāya (Collection of Middle-Length Discourses)

MW: The Monier-Williams Sanskrit Dictionary

PO: Patrick Olivelle

SN: Saundara-nanda

First edition of these texts and translations in this format: Nov, 2015.

(Prepared in digital format for free distribution by Ānandajoti Bhikkhu.)

Cover shows a detail from a Borobudur carving, depicting Siddhārtha's flight from Kapilavāstu

on the horse Kanthaka.

“This royal war-horse, also, as he went, did not touch the ground, the tips of his hooves

seeming to dangle separately in midair.” (BC8.45)

– Introduction –

Convenient Fictions, Irreligious Irony, Golden Sitting

For the last seven years, at the therapeutic snail’s pace of one verse per day, I have been

translating two works of Aśvaghoṣa known in Sanskrit as

mahā-kāvya,

epic poems or epic tales.

They are not exactly works of fiction; they are based on historical fact, but only loosely. In any

case, they are not to be taken too literally, because they are so full of metaphor and – in the gap

between their ostensible and hidden meanings – so full of irony.

Some teachings, like the Buddha’s four noble truths, are well represented both on and below

the surface.

Those four noble truths are:

1. the truth of suffering,

2. the truth of the arising of suffering,

3. the truth of cessation of suffering, and

4. the truth of a practical means leading in the direction of the cessation of suffering.

Aśvaghoṣa records the Buddha’s statement of the four noble truths, in brief, like this:

iti duḥkham etad

“This is suffering.

iyam asya samudaya-latā pravartikā

This is the tangled mass of causes producing it.

śāntir iyam

This is cessation.

ayam upāya iti

Here is a means.”

Here the fourth noble truth is not expressed in terms of a metaphor.

Upāya

means that by which

one reaches one’s aim, an expedient of any kind, a means-whereby.

At the same time, the Buddha did use for the fourth noble truth the metaphor of a path (mārga).

Hence:

“This is suffering, which is constant and akin to trouble; this is the cause of suffering, akin to

starting it; / This is cessation of suffering, akin to walking away. And this, akin to a refuge, is a

peaceable path.” // SN16.4 //

The Noble Eightfold Path, also known as the Middle Way, is a metaphor for the threefold

practice of ignorance-destroying wisdom (prajñā), backed by twofold practice of meditative

balance (samādhi), backed by threefold practice of integrity (śīla).

See Saundara-nanda (SN) 3.12.

Introduction – 4

In reality there

such a thing as

practice

of threefold

śīla,

twofold

samādhi,

and threefold

prajñā,

leading in the direction of ending of ignorance, but there is no such path as a Noble Eightfold

Path. The Path is a kind of fiction. In the real world, there are real, non-fictional paths that can

be walked, like the ancient Ridgeway running across England from Salisbury Plain to East

Anglia. There are real roads that can be travelled, like the Pan-American highway linking many

nations in Northern, Central and South America. But no Noble Eightfold Path or Middle Way is

marked on any map.

So even such a core teaching as the Noble Eightfold Path is a metaphor, a fiction. It is something

akin to the dream which, if we are lucky, helps our tired bodies and minds to recuperate during

the night.

But Zen masters from the time of the Buddha, though invariably steeped in actual practice,

have shown themselves to be skilled in the use of such dreamlike fictions – using their fingers,

metaphorically, to point at the moon. And none has been more skilled in using metaphors,

similes, parodies, et cetera, than Aśvaghoṣa.

Convenient Fictions

Speaking of putting fictions to practical use, in 1906, in a book titled The Integrative Action of

the Nervous System, Sir Charles Sherrington wrote of “the

convenient fiction of the simple reflex.”

The convenient fiction of the simple reflex.

A lot of irrational, fearful, unconscious human behaviour can be explained with reference to a

primitive fear reflex called (after the Austrian paediatrician Ernst Moro who identified it) “the

Moro reflex.” As a simple reflex, a thing unto itself, the Moro reflex is a convenient but empty

fiction. Any simple reflex is an empty fiction because the human organism and its environment

all work unfathomably together, in an integrated way, as a whole. And yet the Moro reflex,

though a fiction, is convenient. When in Buddha-carita Canto 8 Aśvaghoṣa describes arms being

thrown up and out in grief,

when in Saundara-nanda Canto 6 he describes Sundarī performing

the same abduction of the arms while gasping and going red,

and when indeed in SN Canto 12

he describes the shocked Nanda seeming to go white,

I find it convenient to refer in my

footnotes to the Moro reflex – as if there were such a thing, as a thing unto itself, as a Moro

reflex.

In the Mahaparinibbana-sutta, the Buddha seems to emphasize this particular order –

śīla

(using voice

and body well, making a clean living) supporting

samādhi

(true mindfulness, balanced stillness)

supporting

prajñā

(seeing and thinking straight, true initiative) – while at the same time each element

supports the others in a circular fashion. So it might be a case of “altogether, one after the other.”

BC8.24, 8.37.

SN6.27.

SN12.8.

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